The console games market dwarfs the PC games market
I wonder why that is?
so in the end even if all PC gamers quit EA games, it might not hurt them as much as you think
It will, however, severely damage the PC market.
I suspect EA cares less than most. But I do hope other developers (and publishers!) start to take notice.
I love the convenience of gaming in my living room - on my HDTV
My laptop's got HDMI out and bluetooth. There's no technical reason I shouldn't be able to use a Wiimote and a giant HDTV with it -- just political/business reasons.
with no bloated OS, no need to download the latest gaming API, latest drivers or buy the latest hardware
I run Linux, mostly. But it is absolutely moving in the direction of downloadable things. Certainly, when MMOs are done on a console, you get all the patching irritations of the PC, with none of the script-your-own-UI flexibility.
Yes, WoW lets you write Lua scripts to play with your UI.
I'll probably buy a Wii at some point anyway, because they're cheap and Zelda looks cool. I don't really see myself buying a PS3 or a 360, but I don't hate Nintendo yet.
It might even be interesting to put some money into escrow, to show how much we are actually ready to spend -- but escrow is a lot trickier than a simple petition.
Put another way, I'm sure they can fool themselves into thinking that 0.2% of their customers would've pirated the game if not for DRM.
But if it's 80%, is there really any chance that they'd lose more than 20% of their customers to piracy, if not for DRM?
For that matter, would any business be wise to make a decision that alienates a fucking fifth of their customer base?
EA, I really wanted to buy Mirror's Edge. I was almost considering buying a console for it, so I wouldn't have to deal with the DRM. But with this attitude, I'm sorry, you're not getting a dime of my money, or a minute of my time.
Granted, it may be cheaper, in the short term, to use NAT than to upgrade to ipv6.
But imagine if no one was using NAT anywhere. This would have two effects:
First, techniques like Skype's UDP hole-punching would be completely unnecessary. You wouldn't even need a central server -- you could just use protocols like SIP the way they were meant to be used.
Port forwarding would be a thing of the past. Far more peer-to-peer technologies would just work.
While I'm at it, they have a feedback form -- it requires subscribing to their spam^Wnewsletter, but it's possible they actually don't know how much this idea sucks.
From the video: "Press 3 to request subscriber location information."
Great. So, not only is it blocking all communication while moving sufficiently fast, it's also reporting your location back to anyone who calls.
It seems to be presented as something you'd put on a teen's phone. Great for the parents, I'm sure. The teens are going to hate it.
And for what it's worth, it's not incredibly difficult to talk on the phone while driving -- or to ignore it. I'm sure drunk driving is a much bigger problem.
Despite all this we're-environmental crap, it's worse off, because it requires enormous amounts of electricity to make the larger quantity of aluminum
Better, in that electricity at least can be clean. Plastic really can't.
#$@$!ing annoying square, flat keys from the Macbook, and they're black. Am I the only one who thinks it looks incredibly ugly?
Ugly? Maybe, but I love the way those keys work. I'm the exception, though.
almost every TV and computer monitor on the planet has a matte screen
Well, no, not anymore.
Yet another video adapter. We've got a BIN full of these things for when people need to use a projector. Here's another one, for absolutely no particular good reason.
I'm rooting for whatever to "win" that isn't brain damaged (not that any of the languages mentioned are)
I would say that all of them are, to a certain degree.
Most languages that aren't purely functional are also not trivially multicore. Of Ruby, Python, and Perl, only JRuby actually allows threads that can actually take advantage of multicore, and none of them have particularly elegant structures around threading. And most, I would think, would be very difficult to make work as well as Erlang does, because they have mutable data structures.
Of the languages that do, well, Haskell makes my head hurt -- maybe that's a problem with my head, and not with Haskell, but it does -- and Erlang makes my eyes bleed, coming from Ruby. Reia looks interesting, but I haven't had the time to take a serious look -- and it's also so tiny that I doubt you'd be able to get much done without talking to existing Erlang libraries, and Erlang is already kind of small.
Those are just the major things. There are all kinds of other little warts that annoy me -- again, in Ruby, there's the way 'autoload' works (it doesn't use your custom 'require' statements), and there's a few things that I miss from Javascript (ad-hoc, prototypal object systems).
My own contribution to the problem, as I said, is to try to make Ruby just a bit more multicore-friendly -- by writing an actor library on top of it.
I work for a company that has very few meetings -- basically, we do a Scrum-style meeting every day, and that's it. The rest is just impromptu discussions -- we're all close enough that if there's an urgent question, or something which can't be communicated well via Trac or email, we walk over and talk about it.
Now, the Scrum alone might add up to an hour a week, but I think it's worth it -- makes it a lot easier to figure out who's stuck, and who can help, that kind of thing. And if it sucked, hey, it's over in 10 minutes.
It sounds like what you had wasn't a meeting, it was a lecture. Lectures do suck.
Sure, it's possible, and you don't need to be a "computer scientist" to do so. You can do anything in any language that's Turing-complete.
But that's a bit like saying you can write a webserver in Bash -- aside from just proving it can be done, why would you ever want to write this? What practical reason could you possibly have for using Bash instead of, well, anything else?
I could ask the same questions about Drupal and PHP. Given that Drupal could've been written in any language, and given Dries Buytaert clearly knows other languages (being a computer scientist), what possible reason could he have for using PHP?
can you imagine trying to port all of these unix apps if they made their flavor of unix strange?
Except that if you don't port, people complain (and rightly so) that the app is too different. Any X11 app is automatically going to have at least one thing obviously "wrong" with it -- command+Q will very likely quit more than one app.
I don't find much consistency in Linux unless you are talking about using apps that share a common toolkit. The Gnome apps are pretty darned consistent with one another... as are the KDE apps. Run a KDE app within the Gnome environment, though, and it really stands out.
However, run a GNOME app (it's an acronym, actually) in a modern KDE environment, and it doesn't, so much -- there's actually a gtk+ skin that implements qt themes. In other words, pretty much the whole KDE look is mirrored in the GTK app.
But then, pretty much the only GTK app I use on a regular basis is Firefox, and even the difference between the two, at least in keystrokes, isn't much. Certainly nowhere near the difference between text in TextMate and text in Terminal, or an X11 GUI vs a Cocoa GUI. I won't even mention Classic.
Not that there aren't the occasional oddballs -- TCL/TK apps are going to look hideous, no matter what your main environment is. And most of the more interesting alternate window managers are crazily different. But these are the exception, not the rule, and not something any decent platform can avoid.
Ah, well -- I started this discussion saying it was my own bias, and it looks like that's still true, somewhat. But I'm not sure it's possible to have an unbiased discussion about this, unless we go find the guy who only ever uses Linux VTs. And he'll hate them all equally.
I wasn't saying that no open source ads exist, just that you need advertising to achieve popularity.
I'm just saying, it doesn't look like these ads had much of an impact.
But maybe you're right -- maybe it takes a certain critical mass of exposure before you start to see results. But I won't speculate -- marketing is such a black art anyway.
Perhaps we could say it's the easiest kind of IT job to outsource, but none are easy. It's hard enough to communicate your needs to contractors who at least have English as a first language -- and I speak from experience.
All of this means that it would be very difficult to outsource a job or two. If they're going to outsource, it'll be the whole department.
If you had programming and graphic design skills, you could go into game development.
I don't personally know any game developers, but do they really not split that up? My understanding is, the programmers program, and the designers design.
My point is more that neither should fail, ever, certainly not for days at a time.
Technically, it should be easier to keep the network running, as it doesn't need anything from the outside (except power) -- if the Internet is down, you can probably keep working.
So, I read the rest of the article, to see if he got anything else right. Well...
But will PHP be able to shake the casual structure that encourages beginners to whip up spaghetti code? Will it be able to continue to mix the presentation layer and the application layer without driving everyone insane?
It's true that PHP encourages this, and I find it a little disturbing that people are building web frameworks in what is essentially a Turing-complete template language. It would be as if the next big thing was written in PostScript.
But in a larger sense, this isn't nearly as relevant as how you use it. Drupal is proof that you can do good things with PHP.
However, I do prefer to work in a language that helps, rather than hinders, such a design.
Some want to place their bets on Ruby on Rails, a striking and elegant solution that produces sophisticated results in no time.... This simplicity often turns into shackles when the programmers reach the edge of the framework's capabilities. Changing little details or producing slightly unorthodox output can be maddening.
That's downright flamebait.
I suspect that many Rails developers do feel this way, for the same reason that many PHP programs are useless spaghetti code -- as a complete side effect. Since Rails is so easy to get into, it's a rude awakening when you need to do something it doesn't provide -- you're finding out just how much work Rails has done for you.
But seriously, "slightly unorthodox output"? Are you serious? Probably one of the easiest things to do is add another view of the same data -- even in another format.
A programmer gets the rock-solid foundation of compiled Java code mixed with the flexibility to diddle with the Java objects in real time.
Maybe Groovy makes that easier, but Java already had reflection. Next!
thanks to the lightning performance of the new JavaScript semi-compilers, the language is bound to look even more attractive.... The semantic barriers won't be as important as the languages rush to steal good ideas from one and other.... In five years, there's a good chance you'll be able to imagine you're writing Python while the code is interpreted by something called JavaScript.
Interesting ideas. None of which apply to Javascript, now or ever.
You see, Javascript client-side is a nightmare, because you have to make it work in several existing browsers, which don't always play nice with the standards.
And Javascript, the language, is evolving at an incredibly slow pace -- mostly because it's got the worst case of cruft of any language. Add an interesting feature in a browser, and you probably break some client code. Even if you're careful, as a developer, I can't use your feature if it isn't also present in other browsers.
So changing the core syntax of the language is right out. If we were to break backwards compatibility in such a dramatic way, it'd make a lot more sense to port Python to the browser.
In which case, we may as well use Java or Silverlight -- plenty of dynamic languages target these. My personal favorite would probably be JRuby in an applet.
Libraries such as Dojo and jQuery aren't just a set of helpful routines; they actively tweak the language and ask you to adopt a particular set of idioms.
True enough -- except that in the case of jQuery, it actually doesn't force anything. If you really like wasting time, you can write using the old idioms you learned. If you don't like jQuery, you can always rename the $ variable and pretend it doesn't exist.
The focus really should be on the next point, which is actually a good one:
Applications are becoming their own worlds.
Especially in a dynamic language, any body of code of sufficient size is going to have some idioms of its own.
Someone does something that breaks a piece of software, now the whole department/company/whatever doesn't have it rather than just that person. A network outage is now a complete work stopping event rather than an inconvenience.
That's also what happens in a well-managed thick-client environment, where all user documents are stored on a fileserver. If said fileserver implodes, no one can work.
Also, depending on what kind of work you're doing, an Internet outage can be just as severe.
Slashdot Mirror
The console games market dwarfs the PC games market
I wonder why that is?
so in the end even if all PC gamers quit EA games, it might not hurt them as much as you think
It will, however, severely damage the PC market.
I suspect EA cares less than most. But I do hope other developers (and publishers!) start to take notice.
I love the convenience of gaming in my living room - on my HDTV
My laptop's got HDMI out and bluetooth. There's no technical reason I shouldn't be able to use a Wiimote and a giant HDTV with it -- just political/business reasons.
with no bloated OS, no need to download the latest gaming API, latest drivers or buy the latest hardware
I run Linux, mostly. But it is absolutely moving in the direction of downloadable things. Certainly, when MMOs are done on a console, you get all the patching irritations of the PC, with none of the script-your-own-UI flexibility.
Yes, WoW lets you write Lua scripts to play with your UI.
I'll probably buy a Wii at some point anyway, because they're cheap and Zelda looks cool. I don't really see myself buying a PS3 or a 360, but I don't hate Nintendo yet.
potential customers will actually take their money and walk away.
I would guess most gamers aren't quite like me -- DRM wasn't really an issue until Spore.
But I am deadly serious.
If anyone wants to start a petition, I'll sign.
It might even be interesting to put some money into escrow, to show how much we are actually ready to spend -- but escrow is a lot trickier than a simple petition.
Since you have no idea if you're running on a mirror, rooftop or a blanket of mushy turds.... You have no point of reference.
In other words, no worse than every other first-person game ever, just very different and a lot more interesting.
I'll agree with GP, I was blown away. But I won't be buying it, even if EA would like to pretend I'm an insignificant minority.
Defendant's lawyer has got to be kidding.
FWIW, Jack Thompson actually went as far as violating restraining orders. I'm not sure this is up there yet.
But, IANAL.
There's also the altitude and the static.
Aside from the coolness, it's not particularly healthy to hardware.
If you want a Linux version, make sure you buy good Linux games that are out there. Push the statistics.
Penny Arcade Adventures was fun, and pretty trivial to get working on Ubuntu, even 64-bit.
80% is significantly different than 99.8%.
Put another way, I'm sure they can fool themselves into thinking that 0.2% of their customers would've pirated the game if not for DRM.
But if it's 80%, is there really any chance that they'd lose more than 20% of their customers to piracy, if not for DRM?
For that matter, would any business be wise to make a decision that alienates a fucking fifth of their customer base?
EA, I really wanted to buy Mirror's Edge. I was almost considering buying a console for it, so I wouldn't have to deal with the DRM. But with this attitude, I'm sorry, you're not getting a dime of my money, or a minute of my time.
Granted, it may be cheaper, in the short term, to use NAT than to upgrade to ipv6.
But imagine if no one was using NAT anywhere. This would have two effects:
First, techniques like Skype's UDP hole-punching would be completely unnecessary. You wouldn't even need a central server -- you could just use protocols like SIP the way they were meant to be used.
Port forwarding would be a thing of the past. Far more peer-to-peer technologies would just work.
Second, we'd run out of IPv4 a lot faster.
While I'm at it, they have a feedback form -- it requires subscribing to their spam^Wnewsletter, but it's possible they actually don't know how much this idea sucks.
From the video: "Press 3 to request subscriber location information."
Great. So, not only is it blocking all communication while moving sufficiently fast, it's also reporting your location back to anyone who calls.
It seems to be presented as something you'd put on a teen's phone. Great for the parents, I'm sure. The teens are going to hate it.
And for what it's worth, it's not incredibly difficult to talk on the phone while driving -- or to ignore it. I'm sure drunk driving is a much bigger problem.
Despite all this we're-environmental crap, it's worse off, because it requires enormous amounts of electricity to make the larger quantity of aluminum
Better, in that electricity at least can be clean. Plastic really can't.
#$@$!ing annoying square, flat keys from the Macbook, and they're black. Am I the only one who thinks it looks incredibly ugly?
Ugly? Maybe, but I love the way those keys work. I'm the exception, though.
almost every TV and computer monitor on the planet has a matte screen
Well, no, not anymore.
Yet another video adapter. We've got a BIN full of these things for when people need to use a projector. Here's another one, for absolutely no particular good reason.
Didn't they already use this one in the Air?
If I could be convinced it worked well with Linux, I'd consider it.
So... why didn't they just do HDMI, like everyone else?
I'm rooting for whatever to "win" that isn't brain damaged (not that any of the languages mentioned are)
I would say that all of them are, to a certain degree.
Most languages that aren't purely functional are also not trivially multicore. Of Ruby, Python, and Perl, only JRuby actually allows threads that can actually take advantage of multicore, and none of them have particularly elegant structures around threading. And most, I would think, would be very difficult to make work as well as Erlang does, because they have mutable data structures.
Of the languages that do, well, Haskell makes my head hurt -- maybe that's a problem with my head, and not with Haskell, but it does -- and Erlang makes my eyes bleed, coming from Ruby. Reia looks interesting, but I haven't had the time to take a serious look -- and it's also so tiny that I doubt you'd be able to get much done without talking to existing Erlang libraries, and Erlang is already kind of small.
Those are just the major things. There are all kinds of other little warts that annoy me -- again, in Ruby, there's the way 'autoload' works (it doesn't use your custom 'require' statements), and there's a few things that I miss from Javascript (ad-hoc, prototypal object systems).
My own contribution to the problem, as I said, is to try to make Ruby just a bit more multicore-friendly -- by writing an actor library on top of it.
Seriously? Applets? again? Have fun.
People are already doing them with Flash. Given the choice, at least Java is open source, and supports languages other than ActionScript.
And I think he was talking about Groovy embedded [codehaus.org] inside of Java.
Which doesn't change a lot. I know he was talking about Groovy, but he was also talking about a feature of it that already existed in Java.
The article is similar to just about anything you read written by anyone : An alternating points of insight and clueless, but generally well meaning.
Well meaning, sure.
I just got the feeling, reading this, that the guy didn't even do his homework, and that he was a journalist, not a programmer.
IMs can be ignored, or postponed. Physical meetings cannot, unless you're the boss.
Having not actually seen a 37signals app in action, I have no idea what a campfire session ends up being.
Not all meetings.
I work for a company that has very few meetings -- basically, we do a Scrum-style meeting every day, and that's it. The rest is just impromptu discussions -- we're all close enough that if there's an urgent question, or something which can't be communicated well via Trac or email, we walk over and talk about it.
Now, the Scrum alone might add up to an hour a week, but I think it's worth it -- makes it a lot easier to figure out who's stuck, and who can help, that kind of thing. And if it sucked, hey, it's over in 10 minutes.
It sounds like what you had wasn't a meeting, it was a lecture. Lectures do suck.
Sure, it's possible, and you don't need to be a "computer scientist" to do so. You can do anything in any language that's Turing-complete.
But that's a bit like saying you can write a webserver in Bash -- aside from just proving it can be done, why would you ever want to write this? What practical reason could you possibly have for using Bash instead of, well, anything else?
I could ask the same questions about Drupal and PHP. Given that Drupal could've been written in any language, and given Dries Buytaert clearly knows other languages (being a computer scientist), what possible reason could he have for using PHP?
can you imagine trying to port all of these unix apps if they made their flavor of unix strange?
Except that if you don't port, people complain (and rightly so) that the app is too different. Any X11 app is automatically going to have at least one thing obviously "wrong" with it -- command+Q will very likely quit more than one app.
I don't find much consistency in Linux unless you are talking about using apps that share a common toolkit. The Gnome apps are pretty darned consistent with one another... as are the KDE apps. Run a KDE app within the Gnome environment, though, and it really stands out.
However, run a GNOME app (it's an acronym, actually) in a modern KDE environment, and it doesn't, so much -- there's actually a gtk+ skin that implements qt themes. In other words, pretty much the whole KDE look is mirrored in the GTK app.
But then, pretty much the only GTK app I use on a regular basis is Firefox, and even the difference between the two, at least in keystrokes, isn't much. Certainly nowhere near the difference between text in TextMate and text in Terminal, or an X11 GUI vs a Cocoa GUI. I won't even mention Classic.
Not that there aren't the occasional oddballs -- TCL/TK apps are going to look hideous, no matter what your main environment is. And most of the more interesting alternate window managers are crazily different. But these are the exception, not the rule, and not something any decent platform can avoid.
Ah, well -- I started this discussion saying it was my own bias, and it looks like that's still true, somewhat. But I'm not sure it's possible to have an unbiased discussion about this, unless we go find the guy who only ever uses Linux VTs. And he'll hate them all equally.
I wasn't saying that no open source ads exist, just that you need advertising to achieve popularity.
I'm just saying, it doesn't look like these ads had much of an impact.
But maybe you're right -- maybe it takes a certain critical mass of exposure before you start to see results. But I won't speculate -- marketing is such a black art anyway.
Programming is an easily-outsourced IT job.
Bullshit.
Perhaps we could say it's the easiest kind of IT job to outsource, but none are easy. It's hard enough to communicate your needs to contractors who at least have English as a first language -- and I speak from experience.
All of this means that it would be very difficult to outsource a job or two. If they're going to outsource, it'll be the whole department.
If you had programming and graphic design skills, you could go into game development.
I don't personally know any game developers, but do they really not split that up? My understanding is, the programmers program, and the designers design.
My point is more that neither should fail, ever, certainly not for days at a time.
Technically, it should be easier to keep the network running, as it doesn't need anything from the outside (except power) -- if the Internet is down, you can probably keep working.
So, I read the rest of the article, to see if he got anything else right. Well...
But will PHP be able to shake the casual structure that encourages beginners to whip up spaghetti code? Will it be able to continue to mix the presentation layer and the application layer without driving everyone insane?
It's true that PHP encourages this, and I find it a little disturbing that people are building web frameworks in what is essentially a Turing-complete template language. It would be as if the next big thing was written in PostScript.
But in a larger sense, this isn't nearly as relevant as how you use it. Drupal is proof that you can do good things with PHP.
However, I do prefer to work in a language that helps, rather than hinders, such a design.
Some want to place their bets on Ruby on Rails, a striking and elegant solution that produces sophisticated results in no time.... This simplicity often turns into shackles when the programmers reach the edge of the framework's capabilities. Changing little details or producing slightly unorthodox output can be maddening.
That's downright flamebait.
I suspect that many Rails developers do feel this way, for the same reason that many PHP programs are useless spaghetti code -- as a complete side effect. Since Rails is so easy to get into, it's a rude awakening when you need to do something it doesn't provide -- you're finding out just how much work Rails has done for you.
But seriously, "slightly unorthodox output"? Are you serious? Probably one of the easiest things to do is add another view of the same data -- even in another format.
A programmer gets the rock-solid foundation of compiled Java code mixed with the flexibility to diddle with the Java objects in real time.
Maybe Groovy makes that easier, but Java already had reflection. Next!
thanks to the lightning performance of the new JavaScript semi-compilers, the language is bound to look even more attractive.... The semantic barriers won't be as important as the languages rush to steal good ideas from one and other.... In five years, there's a good chance you'll be able to imagine you're writing Python while the code is interpreted by something called JavaScript.
Interesting ideas. None of which apply to Javascript, now or ever.
You see, Javascript client-side is a nightmare, because you have to make it work in several existing browsers, which don't always play nice with the standards.
And Javascript, the language, is evolving at an incredibly slow pace -- mostly because it's got the worst case of cruft of any language. Add an interesting feature in a browser, and you probably break some client code. Even if you're careful, as a developer, I can't use your feature if it isn't also present in other browsers.
So changing the core syntax of the language is right out. If we were to break backwards compatibility in such a dramatic way, it'd make a lot more sense to port Python to the browser.
In which case, we may as well use Java or Silverlight -- plenty of dynamic languages target these. My personal favorite would probably be JRuby in an applet.
Libraries such as Dojo and jQuery aren't just a set of helpful routines; they actively tweak the language and ask you to adopt a particular set of idioms.
True enough -- except that in the case of jQuery, it actually doesn't force anything. If you really like wasting time, you can write using the old idioms you learned. If you don't like jQuery, you can always rename the $ variable and pretend it doesn't exist.
The focus really should be on the next point, which is actually a good one:
Applications are becoming their own worlds.
Especially in a dynamic language, any body of code of sufficient size is going to have some idioms of its own.
The main reason frameworks are important
Larry Wall nabbed Python's object system when he created Perl...
Erm, WTF? Perl was released in 1987; Python was 1991.
Someone does something that breaks a piece of software, now the whole department/company/whatever doesn't have it rather than just that person. A network outage is now a complete work stopping event rather than an inconvenience.
That's also what happens in a well-managed thick-client environment, where all user documents are stored on a fileserver. If said fileserver implodes, no one can work.
Also, depending on what kind of work you're doing, an Internet outage can be just as severe.